Dennis Potter: Father of "The Singing Detective"
From November/December 2003 Psoriasis Advance
First posted Nov. 3, 2003
Dennis Potter, the man behind "The Singing Detective," was one of England's most productive and provocative writers for television for nearly three decades, before his death in 1994. He has been called "arguably the most important creative figure in the history of British television," and although his following in the United States is smaller, it is no less rabid. Potter has a cult-like following of fiercely loyal fans.
His best-known work in the U.S. might be "Pennies from Heaven," a 1981 movie starring Steve Martin that Potter adapted from his original 1978 BBC miniseries. Critics were not kind to it, and Potter was somewhat bitter about his time in Hollywood.
The author was born in 1935 in England. His career included stints as a journalist and politician before he committed himself full time to writing, particularly for television. Potter turned to writing after the onset of his psoriatic arthritis in 1961, and he was prolific, producing dozens of television scripts, books and screenplays.
Illness and infirmity are prominent themes in Potter's work, clearly reflecting the real-life struggles he had with psoriasis and psoriatic arthritis. As his hands became crippled with arthritis, he was forced to strap a pen to his hand to continue writing.
In "The Singing Detective," Potter for the first time gave the central character (Philip Marlow) psoriasis and psoriatic arthritis. He always said "Detective" was one of the "least autobiographical pieces I've ever attempted," but it was written right after one of his worst flares, as he described in a 1990 interview: "I would have these three month attacks in which literally I would look like a monster when it happened—100% psoriasis and you also lose control obviously of your temperature, halfway between hallucination and, and whatever. But also you cannot operate, you cannot move, you cannot think, I mean you're just like a monster there lying in the corner of the room."
This is much the same situation in which Potter places the main character in "The Singing Detective."
In the early 1990s, Potter wrote a screenplay of "Detective," changing the setting to America and moving it from the 1940s to the 1950s. At various times over the past decade, numerous major Hollywood studios, directors and actors expressed interest in the project, but it was Mel Gibson who brought it to the screen as an independent film. He purchased the script and recruited Robert Downey Jr. to star and Keith Gordon to direct.
For Gordon, a big Potter fan, it was important to stay true to the script and Potter's vision. "I basically felt like let's not change anything unless there's a really good reason," Gordon said. "And Potter's agent's feeling was he would have been fine with everything that you guys did. She was very aware—she'd been with the script all along. She said there's nothing that you did that would have bothered him in the least. It's all within the spirit of what he was doing."
Gordon hopes this will appease Potter fans who are leery about another Hollywood remake of one of the author's classics.
Potter was diagnosed in early 1994 with terminal pancreatic cancer; he died four months later, just weeks after his wife of 35 years died of breast cancer. Shortly before his death, Potter gave a no-holds-barred interview to the BBC. He talked about his work and his resolve to continue writing until the end. As he sipped from a wine glass containing morphine, he told the interviewer: "My only regret is if I die four pages too soon."
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